Value Innovation: The Strategic Logic of High Growth

Reprinted in Harvard Business Review. Vol. 82, N 7/8, Pp. 172-180. July-August 2004. Why is it that some companies succeed in achieving sustained high growth in both revenues and profits? The authors studied high growth companies - and their less successful competitors - and found a fundamental difference in the way each group approached strategy. The slow growth companies took a conventional approach - conventional in the sense that they did what most companies do. Building competitive advantages dominated their strategy thinking. In contrast, the high growth companies paid little attention to matching or beating the competition. Instead they sought to make their competition irrelevant, through a strategic logic the authors have come to call "value innovation".